Art school is a waste of your time!

Art school is a waste of your time, and that's exactly why you should do it.

It's coming the end of my time as a student—technically my course is finished but it's not really over until the exhibition opens on Saturday 4th and I can have a beer along with a well deserved pat on the back. As I look back, I feel an epiphany coming on; what a brilliant waste of my time this all was!

If I had decided that university was not the way, confident that I could work my way up through the design industry without the backbone of a degree certificate; it's likely I could very well have done. Many people now are basking in the good light of degree free design careers, riding the smooths behind the giant boats, such as David Carson. I would be in £40,000 less debt and three years into a career—sounds pretty swell doesn't it?

I've wasted time, effort and money on mass; to be almost exactly where I could have started, merely three years in the future. But, (here comes a but bigger than anything you'll find on MTV) it has given me something that I would not have gotten otherwise. Time.

(sort of related)

I've spent three years, 36 months, 156 weeks and about 200 episodes of Countdown learning, experimenting and failing at Design. If I was in job, I'd be making money but I'd only learn from what I was being paid to do and the work that was available to me; but university has allowed me to make dogs out of balloons, learn all the rules and how break them too.

All this time spent is a massive waste, but that's only really the view of the man who left school, started working on the labour yard and has been there ever since. In my mind, the only time wasted was the huge summers between each semester of study and anytime I spent not experimenting, pretending I knew better.

Art school is a waste of your time and it's a waste of my time; it comes at a huge cost and it'll make you pull your hair out and that is the best bit about it. You learn from your failings, you grow from your struggles and you somehow become a master of faux-asain cuisine. (I'm talking about packet Ramen if you hadn't guessed)

So waste you time and become a designer, wash you precious time down the drain and become an artist. If you want to actually want to succeed then make sure you put in as much effort as possible to make this wastage it's most poignant. Experiment, cry, learn, fail, set things on fire.

You can make it without an arts degree, but wasting your time in such a glamourised fashion really stands testament to how serious you are about your subject. Only true artists drive themselves into crippling debt for no guaranteed outcome. Remember that my children.

Go forth and waste.